President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Well, my Trumpist brother and I will talk about the disappointing end to the Vols' football season . . . and the amazing recruits and transfers that will REALLY get them over the hump next year.

Same as every year for the past 25 years.

 

That's my plan. It's going to absolutely rip my mom up, who really likes it when we all get together for the holidays. My mother also thinks the world of my wife (we joke that she likes her more) so maybe that cushions things a bit.

 

Please explain how the switch of teaching methods 30-40 years ago was woke.

 

Two years ago mom and I were bracing to catch absolute hell at Thanksgiving (earned TBF) after the Vols finally beat Bama. Then Tennessee thoughtfully got poll axed by South Carolina five days beforehand and they could barely stand to talk football.

So in conclusion, I need the state of Georgia to give me one decent thing this rotten autumn with a similar-sized blowout.

 

My kid is a kindergartner. They get taught phonics and sight words and using contextual whole language. And he just tested at a third grade reading level at five. What the fuck are we talking about?

 

Wanting to shoot protesters in the legs
But hey....the cost of eggs
Constant racist attacks
But hey.....the cost of Big Macs
Racist psycho in charge of government
But hey....he's gonna lower my rent
He'll hire his goons for sure
But hey....he's anti-war
He's gonna steal and grift
But hey...pronouns caused this rift
He'll stack the court with atrocious picks
But hey.....trans kids in high school athletics
He'll send in another violent mob
But hey.... he's gonna get me a job

 

The Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics.

***
There are many schools of thought on how best to aid this process, but the main contretemps has been about whether kids need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they’ll figure out the patterns. The latter theory, sometimes known as whole language, says teaching phonics is boring and repetitive, and a large percentage of English words diverge from the rules. (Hello there, though, thought, through, trough and tough!) But if you immerse children in beautiful stories, they’ll be motivated to crack the code, to recognize each word.

That first quote - for which Weaver deserves a ton of credit for being honest - is breathtaking.

At any rate. whole language started 30-40 years ago, and it is horsecrap. As the story explains, though, educators didn't want to totally give it up, so they blended phonics and whole language as a "balanced" approach, and the universities just kept chugging along with their whole language curriculum.

The phonics community chose to rebrand what it does, calling it the "science of reading," to help the reading industry give educators, I dunno, some kind of cover to say it wasn't exactly phonics...so they could teach phonics. That's how stupid all this is.

 

Your kid is surely quite smart and probably grew up in a house of people who like words, books and reading.

In my opinion, the balanced approach is valuable only for the phonics part as it relates to anything after the highest percentile.

Why more U.S. schools are embracing a new 'science of reading'

In 2000, a government-formed National Reading Panel released the findings of its exhaustive examination of the research. It declared phonics instruction was crucial to teaching young readers, along with several related concepts.

Whole language had lost.

What emerged, though, was an informal truce that came to be known as “balanced literacy” and borrowed from both approaches. The goal: Get kids into books they found enjoyable as quickly as possible.

But in practice, phonics elements often got short shrift, said Michael Kamil, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

“It wasn’t a true compromise,” said Kamil, who had sat on the national reading panel. The approach often led to students learning how to guess words, instead of how to sound them out.

 

I'd like to know who is teaching all these people to say things like:

Could Ent
Did Ent
Should Ent
Import Ent
Were Ent
Have Ent

Ent is not a word. Ant is not a word, yet we hear Import Ant. That's one special ant.

 

Hey hey, my my
Let's watch democracy die
It's harder to believe the truth
Than to believe the big lie
Hey hey, my my

Out of the blue and into the red
We forgot all the COVID dead
And when it's gone, you never get it back
When you've you sold us out for a Big Mac

The terrible things he's done have been forgotten
This is the story of Donny Rotten
It's better to burn down than fade away
The terrible things he's done have been forgotten

 

Word among the right wing screechosphere is that this Thanksgiving will be a nonstop touchdown dance, "game over, we win, you lose, sit down, shut up, and. ... scoreboard."

Something about "The Corleone Family settling all its accounts."

The plan is this will produce showers of sweet sweet liberal tears and angry storm-outs, to which the suggested response is "Hasta la vista."